Stuart Lancaster is nothing if not hot on discipline. He was in his element at Sandhurst as the England squad and management were welcomed to the World Cup, and he swatted aside any suggestion that Manu Tuilagi’s exclusion from that squad was a stand of convenience, after the sometime England centre had claimed earlier in the week that Lancaster knew he was going to miss the World Cup with injury anyway.
“Manu had trained with us right the way through the Six Nations,” Lancaster said. “He’d been injured but he was training. As far as we were concerned, we didn’t know if he was going to be fit or not. We were hoping he was. He was very much in the Ben Morgan category for me. Ben Morgan was injured at the time, but we were going to bring Ben into the camp even if he wasn’t quite right to allow him as long a time as possible.”
Tuilagi also claimed that he had not assaulted two police officers on an April night in Leicester, even though he pleaded guilty to all the charges to avoid an adjournment to a date during the World Cup – a tournament he now says he was never going to play in. Tuilagi and Lancaster had a meeting two days before the hearing but Lancaster dismissed Tuilagi’s claim that he had not had a chance to set out his side of the story. “You get a chance to give your side of the story in court, don’t you? I’m not the judge and jury. It’s not for me to decide if he’s guilty. My decision was always going to be based on what the court decided.”
Such considerations seemed a long way away as the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst laid on its august surroundings for the squad to receive their caps and participation medals. The players walked to the presentation between cheering aisles of friends and families in the mess hall of New College. It was not exactly a military parade, but they seemed relaxed enough as they sauntered in, single file, in alphabetical order, to the soaring strains of Led Zeppelin, creating a pleasingly symmetrical unit. The averagely heighted Brad Barritt led the way, until the locks George Kruis, Joe Launchbury and Courtney Lawes, one after the other, formed a peak in the middle. Thereafter, the heights fell away by degrees to the Youngs brothers at the back. If Lancaster had doctored his squad’s birth certificates, he couldn’t have come up with a much better running order.
It has been a week of ceremony for England with a send-off from Take That at the O2 Arena on Wednesday, followed by this welcome at a venue as far removed temperamentally and architecturally as could be imagined, albeit just a few miles away. Now, though, the work resumes in earnest. Lancaster announces his team on Monday for the tournament’s opening match on Friday night. He will be selecting his strongest side for that clash with Fiji, whose march up the rankings of late to No9 in the world has reinforced Pool A’s reputation as the most fiendish in World Cup history. He does not expect his side to change much for the two games to follow, against Wales and Australia.
“I think we’ve got to pick our strongest team to start with. We obviously trust all the guys in the squad, so sometimes you might freshen the team up by changing a Joe Launchbury for Courtney Lawes, Ben Morgan and Billy Vunipola, Danny Care … there’s all sorts of changes we could make, but not wholesale changes. But I’m just thinking about Fiji. If you look beyond that you’ll come unstuck, because they’re such a good team. It’s probably the most competitive pool that’s ever been picked at a World Cup.”
Then, after a team photo outside New College, and a brief milling about with loved ones, the squad was back on the bus and into camp. The preliminaries are almost over.
